craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

the industry of adjectives and pretense sometimes talk about cowshit in relation to fine burgundy

'farmyard'
A slightly dirty, earthy, manure-type aroma. In a young wine it may indicate poor (unclean) winemaking practices. In an older bottle of red Burgundy it can be a desirable, developed character.

I'm american btw

yes, i've heard that before - the mouldy cabbage and shit side of things. not sure i've ever operated consistently at a high level of wine drinking to fully understand, but i think i've probably had a couple of good burgundies that have had this. it's quite noticeable because, like Fernet, which does a similar thing differently, it's moreishly foul.

ah, tbought you might be. come to the uk SMC! we can have a pint of vinegar and discuss conceptual and actual pickling. seriously tho. pickling fapov. think it over.

I...

the heuristic seems to be.....if you think your wine tastes like shit, check the receipt and if it's less than £30 send it for a refund, if it's more then order a couple dozen extra before it's all shipped to moscow and hong kong

I'm reaching the part of Mason & Dixon where it vaults to the glory of showing its full hand (about 500 pages in), and Fizzles' incredible posts here tie in closely with its notions of trade, craft and ownership (it discusses Mason's weaver stock at length, and the violent horrors visited upon the upstarts who'd have the impertinence to claim some decisive stake in their own production). The pickle-making paragraph especially is probably the best Pynchon I've read by someone other than Pynchon (and even defeats quite a large proportion of the very man's own work).

Anyway, just registering my continued support for the Fizzles Exegesis Project. The most demanding of all possible sitemods would have permabanned everyone except you by now :)

Oh, I could rattle on at length about the wealthy folk (often Russians) whom I work for, and who tend to regard nothing as of any beneficial value unless it is absurdly marked-up.

xpost definitely. i did this once with a burgundy i bought off waitrose innit innit. it tasted fucking awful, and i don't mind fucking awful. took it back and they were all 'it's supposed to taste like that' (i'd checked on the internet about the farmyard, so i wuz ready for them so I said 'taste it!' and they can't so i won). it was horrible tho, not even farmyard, just sharp and nasty, cork wet as well. and the thing about waitrose is they give you double your money back in vouchers, something they don't promote. bought a handful of bottles of facile expensive red and a bar of fruit and nut.

aw imago you are really (definitively) too kind - closest to pynchon that gets is that some of it looks like it was pastiche put thru google translate, but it's fun to dick about.

how was the fruit and nut

the foodstuff I would like to take an amateurish interest in the production of is probably olives and olive oil. have you heard of the electrical supply store in clerkenwell that also sources by reputation the finest olive oil in london, from turkish cyprus? i've tried both their olives and their oil and while i can't say for certain their produce is better than the very best supermarket fare (or even the semi-decent EVOO), the massed power-tools and claw-hammers more than anything else gave it the most appealing essence, piquant flavour bursting unexpected from amidst burnished steel and chipped meshwork, and i returned there several times throughout my otherwise useless masters degree

incidentally, i chased down that coy WdlM riddle in Lispet, Lispett and Vaine i quoted in the earlier post:

The narrator interrupts - tho not before Maunders has has got in a riddle (again interrupted):

What's more, they knew in those days that objects are only of value when representative of subjects. Has it never occurred to you (no, I suppose not) that the Wisest's apes, ivory, and peacocks were symbolical? The apes representing, of course --'
'Of course,' I interrupted hurriedly.

Reading Waldemar Janson's superb Apes and Ape Lore, a book no house should be without, I found the argument that the ape represents luxuria, and that the typical gothic architectural representation of a woman on a pedestal above an ape being beset by serpents, was to indicate that woman's having overcome the sin of luxuria. This woman can be identified with Sheba, whose journey to Solomon was seen as typologically prefiguring the journey of the Magi to Christ, and exemplary of her overcoming her typically oriental sins. Since then apes have been traditionally associated with Solomon's court, and Janson notes:

The symbolic raison d'être of the animal, however, was quickly forgotten, at least in Italy, and the ape survived in these scenes only as an exotic luxury object)

...

In Northern art, on the other hand, the 'pilgrimage ape' retained its identity throughout the 15th century. Since the Journey of the Queen of Sheba was not a popular subject in Late Gothic art, we encounter the animal mostly in the company of the Three Magi. The number of examples is far smaller than in Italian art, but the role of the animal, generally speaking, is clearly symbolic, rather than incidental to the Oriental setting of the scene.

no idea whether this is what WdlM was referring to or whether he was just playing games, but there it is.

how was the fruit and nut

― his LIPS !!! (darraghmac), Wednesday, 11 September 2013 23:12 (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

incapable of judgment d. it's the food of the gods.

fp rescinded, carry on

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/352312074/the-luddite-because-life-is-analogue

haha um.... nope

It’ll feature a first-person confessional piece about an hipster viking lookalike, Jay Williams, who turned to weightlifting to save himself from an early demise. The story covers themes of weight loss, consumption, grief, spirituality and mental illness in a way that connects.

unexpected lols @ "an hipster"

For the record, I think it's a pretty cool project, especially if the content is as worthy as the production values.

be that as it may i think they need to, uh... maybe work on their messaging a little bit

when the video zooms in on logo for THE LUDDITE over a soundtrack of chunky electric guitar power chords, i mean

an 'ipster

I didn't watch the video. I'm generally a supporter of letterpress printing, as I am a letterpress printer, but am constantly thinking about the way it's used/viewed. On one hand it's an old-fashioned process that results in a high-quality product that can't be replicated with cheaper/newer technologies. On the other hand there are people doing it just to keep an old tradition around.

an historic hipster

I assumed there were plenty of small, letterpressed journals floating around, am I wrong?

dan i have no problem with letterpress whatsoever! i'm just unimpressed with the too-precious gee-whiz novelty it brings to the idea of a print-only publication

anyway -- fizzle's suggestion of mobile phone companies being descendant of old textile houses reminded me in a circular manner of this photo that popped up on my tumblr dash recently, coming from a blog mentioned itt before -- itsworn.tumblr.com

http://24.media.tumblr.com/f7350181588b3dd42ed693ffdd38bb08/tumblr_mrjcmnwQJ61qdbn9do1_500.jpg

leather iphone case! with indigo stains from raw denim! ah, the patina of a year's worth of use really adds character to your phone... which you probably won't own anymore past the next 6 months

There aren't that many fully letterpressed journals. It's too much work and too expensive. Only bigger shops that have hot metal equipment and large enough presses can do it in anyway that makes sense.

also using kickstarter to fund a letterpress only journal is a little like being helicoptered into an authentic wilderness experience

this is a dude i know that has his shop right by my house, and i think its super cool in there

http://nomadicletterpress.com/

thx to the minnesota center for book arts, we have a bunch of letterpress journals etc floating around town actually.

http://www.mnbookarts.org/

my boss brought me a bamboo iphone 5 case from shenzhen but I haven't used it yet bc let's face it it's not gonna offer much force absorption in a drop.

and a panda might eat it

Eat it while shitting at the same time. Disgusting creatures.

not enough energy in it iirc? have to eat it continuously, hence the eating/shitting thing. and I think I have existential crises. imagine trying to winnow meaning from that fucked up reductive mechanic.

no wonder they struggle to bother with reproduction, can't imagine that panda teenagers have mcuh to be thankful for- and it's not like they can go any gother

It's almost like the plankton feeding of the terrestrial arena, except not graceful and apparently incredibly tedious and fucking gross.

http://cassch.in/brooklyn/

pretty funny/well-executed even though the joke is a little played

Lol so after posting abt my bamboo iPhone case last Friday I was like oh fuck it might as well try it on, and now I kind of love it and have not had it off since. I left out the most important thing before which is that the back side is taken up entirely by a laser etched US flag.

This seems worth discussing, although I wish it was a little more developed and longer:
http://www.brooklyntheborough.com/2013/10/the-mallification-of-brooklyns-creative-makers/

Oh, here's an article on what it was responding to, for context:
http://hyperallergic.com/88183/blessed-are-the-makers-the-rise-and-fall-of-3rd-ward/

IDK if there's a non-critical craftsmanship thread but I guess I'll post this here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsIo57pH-pA

My parents are there right now! Sending to them.

We had a neon sign made for our wedding from this husband of a co-worker:

http://419neon.com/

He does really good work. The hipster brooklyn artisinal neon place is here:

http://www.litebriteneon.com/

It's in the Old American Can Factory which now has a Whole Foods across the street at the corner of 3rd and 3rd in Brooklyn. I used to work at a letterpress shop across the hall. I'd walk by and see a neon sign on the wall that just said SYD BARRETT. That building would pretty much make this thread's head explode.

Don't remember if I plugged it here, by my contribution so craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality is here:

http://www.sheffieldproduct.com/

meant to comment on the neon sign stuff, as I'd seen that interesting mini-documentary and been to the neon sign boneyard in vegas in the space of a couple of weeks. there couldn't have been a better introduction to vegas than a history told through its discarded neon signs.

couple of things, defining craftspeople away from western bourgeois microindustries -

one is the political and social importance of the craftsman in Gaza (low levels of technical infrastructure, area in need of constant repair), the role of craftsmen in maintaining and improving Gaza's military capability, and the successful mobilisation of the craftsman by Hamas. The Yorkshire Ranter touches on this here. (and has several interesting pieces on how military logistics define the recent intensification of conflict here and here.)

In the Gazan context, the question might be “how much of the work needs a real craftsman, and how much can be done by an underemployed 19-year old who may also be the one to fire it?”, followed by “which of those two is more likely to vote Hamas?” Siege is a fundamentally economic form of warfare; the Israelis are besieging Gaza, and the Gazans are trying to impose a counter-siege (John Kerry wasn’t entirely wrong). As always, it requires the political mobilisation of the skilled on both sides.

The Israelis reckon that the production is organised in craft workshops, about 70 of them, with about 250 employees, i.e about four employees per business. If you assume that each shop is run by a craftsman, this is quite a skill-dense process. That said, this 2009 Der Spiegel piece by a reporter who actually witnessed rocket manufacturing seems to suggest a more informal process, more closely linked to the launch team, although it also identifies that an apprenticeship career path exists or existed. Now that’s interesting!

second, was reading a UN report on Somali/Horn of Africa piracy recently - they have three models of piracy: the artisanal scheme, low level, self-funded piracy, the co-operative scheme (an extension of the artisanal scheme, and usually funded by a committee of financiers), and the individualistic scheme (where the whole is more controlled by a single financier rather than the participants, who resemble a well-ordered militia).

The artisanal Scheme
Not all pirate operations are part of a wider syndicate. For instance, some “ama- teur” pirates have been seen operating in the Gulf of Aden (UNODC 2011a). It is not known what proportion of pirate activities are being sponsored in this way. These operations are of a lower scale and are mainly composed of members of the same family or relatives who share the cost of preparing the operation, either by bringing money or instruments, such as weapons, or a ladder, for instance (Hansen 2012; UNODC 2011a). The cost of such an operation is estimated to be no more than US$300 (Hansen 2012), and its success rather limited. The return on investment is proportionate to the original investment, based on the ransom received and after all costs have been deducted.

(Somali piracy itself has declined significantly in recent years, with piracy having shifted over to the west cost of the continent aiui).

finally, dan - that stuff looks great!

great, ferociously interesting post. more please.

cheers imago, they're placeholders for further reading as much as anything else - the Yorkshire Ranter pieces are well worth reading tho. For the moment should just note that excerpt came from a World Bank report, not a UN report.

Excellent post and very apt choice of thread, Mr. Fizzles T. C. The importance of craft emerges more prominently as available capital recedes, but even in a heavily capitalized venture it's always there, even if it is mostly sunken from view.

http://i.imgur.com/S79bUfd.gif

jfc